Metacognition: The Skill Every Global Leader Needs

The increasingly international nature of business means leaders need new skills to get the full potential of teams and networks of people from a variety of cultural backgrounds. At the NeuroLeadership Summit being held in New York this week, top executives from Citibank, the American Management Association, and American University joined me on a panel to explore these new skills — skills including handling complexity, communicating virtually, and working across cultures.

Key among those is a thinking skill called cultural metacognition. Metacognition simply means thinking about thinking; in this context, thinking about your cultural assumptions. According to our research, if you can gain awareness of your assumptions, you can build trust and take your team beyond cooperating on a task to true creative collaboration.

Imagine you’re driving in a foreign city. It takes heightened self-awareness to avoid getting lost so you need to be aware of the ways in which your mental map may be incomplete. You also need to actively check your assumptions against passing signs and landmarks.

Managers leading teams from different cultures confront a similar challenge. To navigate a working relationship with someone from another culture, you should be aware of your working assumptions about the other person. Checking for signs during the interaction that these assumptions apply is crucial to avoiding wrong turns or collisions in the relationship.

In a recently published paper led by my former student Roy Chua, now a professor at Harvard Business School, we used three different methods to test whether higher cultural metacognition leads to successful creative collaboration across cultures.

First, we assessed individual differences in the cultural metacognition of 43 middle-level managers enrolled in an executive MBA course, using the four-factor self-report cultural intelligence scale. For each manager, we also surveyed former coworkers whose cultural upbringing was different from the manager’s, and asked how they rated the manager’s effectiveness in creative collaboration. Managers with higher metacognition scores were rated as more effective by the other-culture managers who had worked with them.

Second, we surveyed the social networks of another group of executive MBA students, querying the 24 most important contacts in their professional network: Do they share new ideas with the contact? Do they trust the person affectively — from the heart, based on emotions? And, do they trust the person cognitively — from the head, based on evidence?

We asked the MBA students for their contacts’ backgrounds as well as their cultural upbringing. As expected, the MBA students’ cultural metacognition scores predicted the extent to which they experienced idea sharing, specifically in their cross-cultural relationships, though not in their same-culture relationships. To understand how high metacognition fosters the flow of ideas in intercultural relationships, the survey also measured two aspects of trust: affective trust (felt rapport) and cognitive trust (perceived reliability). Results showed that the creative collaboration gap in intercultural relationships arose from a deficit in affective, not cognitive, trust. This suggests that cultural metacognition works through fostering affective rapport that enables idea sharing and innovation.

But does trust lead to collaboration, or collaboration lead to trust? The final study tested this question in an experiment involving 236 undergraduates, invited to the laboratory two at a time. These participants were presented with a challenge similar to the television show “Iron Chef.” They were shown ingredients used in different cuisines and asked to devise a recipe for an innovative chicken dish. After the individual challenge, participants were paired with someone from a different cultural background and asked to collaboratively produce a recipe different from what either had created individually. As in the prior studies, higher cultural metacognition led to greater affective trust and ultimately, more idea sharing and better creative collaboration — as rated subjectively by the participants, and as scored objectively by the expert chef judges.

A manipulation in the experiment confirmed our hypothesis about how the affective trust comes about. Half of the intercultural teams were given 10 minutes to talk personally before working together on the design task while the other half of the teams went directly into the design task without this opportunity. Higher cultural metacognition predicted greater affective trust and creative collaboration solely in the condition where groups had the personal conversation. In short, individuals with higher cultural metacognition did better at the get-acquainted conversations; their sensitivity in relying on cultural preconceptions meant that they were able to bridge the intercultural gap.

The good news is that cultural metacognition can be developed and strengthened over time in the same way driving in a foreign city can be improved. Here’s what managers should consider:

Take positions and assignments in other countries and actively compare notes with others to gain a richer sense of how cultural lenses shape perceptions.

Keep a journal of your successes, failures, and surprises in adapting to a new culture.

Develop a checklist of questions to answer before a first meeting with a new contact. Checklists have proven to reduce mistakes in aviation and medicine, helping pilots and doctors make mistakes under pressure; the same is true in business. So, for instance, a Greek businessperson heading to Germany for a negotiation session might deliberately consider certain norms such as starting the meeting precisely on time, setting a specific agenda, and presenting detailed, fact-based evidence for each argument.

Use web-based tools like Culture Navigator to inform and test your assumptions about a culture that you do not know well.